Fremantle Dockers veteran Matthew Pavlich has said enough time has passed for Freo to adjust to game plan changes, and that it’s now up to players to take responsibility.
Speaking to media on Wednesday, Pavlich said that growing pains are a natural agent of change, but that his Freo teammates must now take ownership of the outcome.
“The game plan has changed a fair bit from last year and that’s where we’ve been tinkering and trying to improve,” Pavlich said.
“With any type of shift there is a bit of time before it gets implemented and executed the way we want.
“But realistically, it’s up to the players now to take responsibility.”
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Pavlich said that senior coach Ross Lyon and the Freo coaching staff have implemented the game plan well, but the execution by the playing group has let the team down.
“Ross and the coaches are going a great job of explaining, and teaching us but the players are trying to get up to speed as quickly as we can,” he said.
“We feel like we need to take more ownership of the decisions we’re making with the ball in hand.”
Ball use has been a talking point of the Freo’s start to the season, with both coaches and players lamenting skill errors, especially in the defensive half of the ground.
Pavlich said that while “ball use” can be somewhat of a broad term, it was easy to improve based on two important factors.
“There are two points of ball use,” he said.
“There’s the skill aspect, making the time throughout the week to improve the skills, and execution on game day.
“Secondly, there’s the decision making process and how that fits into our game plan.”
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The continual review and standard setting of the team was also crucial to Freo’s improvement, according to Pavlich.
“There’s been a lot of review over the last couple days, about whether it’s consistent to what we’ve been trying to implement for a long time,” he said.
“There needs to be an adherence to what we really want out there.”
